I understand that removing these statistics from public view doesn’t eliminate them from the backend and that admins could still access them. My suggestion is not about hiding data from admins, but about limiting public exposure of data.
As for what personal information could be inferred from the summary statistics, it’s more about the potential misuse of the data by bad actors, such as data scraping or unwanted analysis. While the risk is low and the data is anonymized, I believe we could offer users the peace of mind by giving them the option to hide these statistics.
I’m not claiming that we’re breaking the law by not having this ability. My point is that adding this option could be a valuable step towards promoting data privacy, which is the core ethos behind laws like GDPR and CCPA. I hope this clarifies my position and I’m open to further discussions.
Laws often have grey areas, but exploiting these ambiguities doesn’t contribute to a healthy community.
Further, may I inquire whether you’re an official member of the Discourse team or an unaffiliated member of the community?
Moreover, I would like to emphasise that the public site data is my own, even though the platform was created by Discourse. As a user (of discourse platform), it’s my preference to keep my data (statistics in my site) private and not display it publicly. I also think it’s important to note that it’s not as simple as saying, ‘If you don’t like it, then don’t use Discourse.’ There may be many other users who, unknowingly and without the option to remove their data, continue to use the platform.